Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Jet fuel doesn't have to liquefy steel beams, it has to heat them enough to warp them beyond the structural integrity needed to hold up a fucking skyscraper
The whole jet fuel can't melt steel beams theory also requires a flawed understanding of thermodynamics to work. A fire's fuel is just part of the equation needed for temperature output. A coal fire will naturally burn around 900c, but with the proper air flow behind it, you can increase it to 1200c.
The theory is also dependent on people assuming that jet fuel is the primary combustion material, instead of what it really was, the primary ignition source. It was the early 00's, a time before the age of digital storage, and that building had literally tons of paper in their storage rooms. Office fires are known to get very hot, there are plenty of pictures on the Internet of steel joists in an office building "melting" from just a regular old paper fire.
Finally, there is a difference between heat and temperature. Heat is the rate of which energy is transferred to material, temperature is how hot or cold something is. Meaning a large cooler fire may transfer more heat energy to a structure than a smaller hotter fire. It's the equivalence of throwing a bar of iron in a bonfire compared to heating one end of the iron bar with a torch.
@Shalakushka just to be clear I'm not advocating any of these theories. I didn't know what else to call that conspiracy theory.
Someone once handed me a DVD on the street and it had about 2 hours of interviews with engineers, diagrams, mathematics, etc on it so that's my definition of fleshed out.
It's not fleshed out because they got a bunch of idiots to talk on camera, and that's basically the whole fucking problem right there. Conspiracy theories are anti knowledge.
The concept of conspiracy theories as you understand it is a ruse, a misinformation tool.
Look up mk ultra, and some of the other shit the cia has actually gotten up to.
Or hemmingway, being paranoid and crazy. Ah, turns out they were following him and fucking with him, even inside the loony bin!
Nowadays you get qanon and other obviously stupid bullshit rolled under the conspiracy theory label, and that's the fucking point
So sinclair, the one company that runs basically all major news outlets in the US, can discredit anything with one turn of phrase.
So like yeah, you're kinda right. But there is real, fucked up shit that gets swept under that label, and ignored at large because of it.
@Shalakushka no, my point is it was full of diagrams and calculations and crap. I wish I could just show it to you.
I'm not talking about some Ancient Aliens style talking heads and dramatic music. It was on a par with that stuff the Moon landings people get up to with crosshairs analysis and speeds.
You still sound like you think I am somehow agreeing with these theories on some level? I don't get why.
An idea needs more than a bunch of content made for it to be genuinely fleshed out. It has to try to address counter-arguments. Like, for instance, how it doesn't matter what fuel you use to generate heat in an enclosed space. The temperature an oven reaches is not dependent on what fuel you use to heat it, it's dependent on how well the space insulates and retains heat.
You can melt steel with a wood fire, in an appropriate oven.
@Candelestine they do though, they have huge arguments about all of it and they try to rebutt everything. They're like the flat earth people.
I think some of you have only noticed this particular theory in its flaccid form.
With the big theories there's often a soft and hard version. Eg covid vax conspiracies have a soft form (mouth-breathers talking about cellphone towers) and a hard form (people who somehow have medical degrees producing papers using microscopology of blood to claim angular objects in it are nanotech).
Care to share any of this? Sounds to me like fake meme-ey stuff. Can even post it in the local science community if you want, I'm sure we'd be interested over there.
Different fuels absolutely burn at different temps.
I'm a welder and a blacksmith.
When you're using coal, you use an easily ignitable fuel, like wood or naptha to get the coal to burn.
The coal burns hotter and is harder i start than your starter fuel, and cannot be started with just a spark.
The coal burns down into coke, a totally different substance, which burns hotter than the coal.
Even still, on your third level of fuel, in order to actually get steel to a workable temp, you've got to add more oxygen, to make it burn even faster and hotter.
This is all inside a forge, a device that's well insulated and made to heat steel to a workable temp.
There are other fuels that can be made to work, and they all also require blower fans, to add more oxygen.
Or in the case of an oxy/acetelne cutting torch, a bottle of pure o2
Charcoal, derived from wood in a similar fashion to coke from coal, can sort of be used, but does not and will not burn hot enough for anything much larger than a spoon, and aimply can't get hot enough for forge welding.
Now, essentially a giant housefire, getting hot enough to get those steel beams to fail? Sure!
Why'd they collapse from the bottom, that wasn't on fire?
Depends entirely on the design and structure of your forge. Heat can be added in unlimited quantities, and so long as it cannot escape through any openings or through anything weakly insulating, it will simply accumulate ... and accumulate ... and accumulate, as you add more and more joules. The temp will get hotter ... and hotter ... and hotter. What your source of heat is, is irrelevant. This is how the interior of your car gets hotter than the surroundings on a sunny day, despite the source being the same, yes? Containment of the slowly-accumulating heat.
It's like weight. It doesn't matter how heavy a hippo is, if we keep adding hippo ... after hippo ... after hippo to a set of scales, we can eventually reach whatever weight, yes? Accumulation, not individual hippo weight, is what matters. Heat in a forge is no different, assuming your forge contains all the heat produced properly.
And they didn't, they collapsed starting higher up. Check an unedited video.
Ah yes, the sun, heating up my car to millions of degrees with its nigh-infinite fuel source. As it does.
Yeah, insulation matters, that's half the point of the forge. The other half is the fuel you're using. Regular wood fires cannot get hot enough to melt steel.
Oxy/acetelene torches burn hot enough they need no insulation to nearly instantly liquefy steel. Propane cannot do that. Even with the oxy.
Anyway, are you talking about the live footage I watched in school? Where they clearly collapsed from the bottom, like a controlled demolition? The day it happened?
We had a half day
Different fuels do release different amounts of heat when burned, this is true. But, the amount of heat in a fuel, and "temperature" are two different things. Did you not understand my explanation of how that worked?
Memory can get foggy after even a few years, much less 20. Brains are not as pure as we like to think. This is why witness testimony is such weak evidence in a courtroom, where physical evidence like fingerprints are considered much better. People's memories suck.
edit: So how about this one. If wood fires "burn at a low temperature", how does the inside of a forest fire get over 1000 C? If wood just burns at a set temp, wouldn't that be the temp they can reach?